Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-305) · 18% practice allocation

Azure AZ-305: Design business continuity solutions Practice Questions

5 free sample questions from the Design business continuity solutions domain, with answers and explanations. The full AZ-305 bank has 59 questions across 4 domains. Questions are scenario-based and written from the official Azure exam guide.

1.

An architect is choosing between availability zones and region pairs for a workload. Which statement BEST guides the design decision?

  • A. Availability zones protect against datacenter failures within a region (low latency); region pairs protect against a full regional disaster (higher latency, async replication)✓ Correct
  • B. Region pairs protect against zone failures within a datacenter
  • C. Availability zones and region pairs are identical
  • D. Availability zones protect against continent-wide outages
Explanation

Availability zones give in-region resilience against a datacenter/zone failure with synchronous low-latency replication; region pairs give cross-region DR against a regional disaster, typically with asynchronous replication and higher latency. The other options confuse or conflate the two scopes.

2.

A design must provide centralized, application-consistent backups of Azure VMs and on-premises servers with defined retention policies, without building custom scripts. Which service should the architect recommend?

  • A. Azure Backup (Recovery Services vault)✓ Correct
  • B. Azure Policy
  • C. Azure Monitor
  • D. Azure Site Recovery only
Explanation

Azure Backup provides managed, policy-driven, application-consistent backups for Azure VMs and on-premises workloads via a Recovery Services vault. Site Recovery (D) is for replication/failover (DR), not scheduled backup retention; Monitor (C) is telemetry; and Policy (B) is governance.

3.

An application must remain available even if an entire Azure datacenter within a region loses power, with no single point of failure inside the region. Which high-availability design should the architect recommend for the compute tier?

  • A. Deploy across multiple availability zones (e.g., zone-redundant VM Scale Sets behind a zone-redundant load balancer)✓ Correct
  • B. Deploy all VMs in a single availability zone
  • C. Deploy to a second region only, with no in-region redundancy
  • D. Rely on daily backups to recover
Explanation

Spreading compute across availability zones (zone-redundant scale set + zone-redundant load balancer) survives a datacenter/zone failure within the region. A single zone (B) is a single point of failure, cross-region only (C) addresses regional (not in-region datacenter) resilience with higher latency, and backups (D) don't provide continuous availability.

4.

A relational database must tolerate the loss of a single availability zone with zero data loss and automatic failover within the same region. Which Azure SQL Database configuration should the architect recommend?

  • A. Zone-redundant configuration (Business Critical / Premium with zone redundancy)✓ Correct
  • B. A single-zone Basic tier database
  • C. Geo-replication to another continent only
  • D. Manual export to a BACPAC file nightly
Explanation

A zone-redundant Azure SQL Database keeps synchronous replicas across availability zones in the region, surviving a zone loss with automatic failover and no data loss. A single-zone Basic tier (B) has no zone resilience, cross-continent geo-replication (C) is for regional DR (async, potential data loss), and nightly BACPAC exports (D) risk a day of data loss.

5.

A stateless web tier must automatically maintain a minimum number of healthy instances and replace failed ones, spread across zones, to meet a high-availability SLA. Which compute design should the architect recommend?

  • A. A zone-redundant Virtual Machine Scale Set behind a load balancer with health probes✓ Correct
  • B. A single VM with a resource lock
  • C. A manually managed pair of VMs in one zone
  • D. Azure Functions consumption plan with no scaling rules
Explanation

A zone-redundant VM Scale Set with a load balancer and health probes maintains a minimum healthy instance count, auto-replaces unhealthy instances, and spreads across zones for HA. A single VM (B) is a single point of failure, a manual single-zone pair (C) lacks zone resilience and autoscaling, and while Functions can work for some apps, it doesn't match a VM-based scale-set HA requirement here.

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